Love in the Time of Contagion A Diagnosis

In this timely, insightful, and darkly funny investigation, the acclaimed author of Against Love asks: what does living in dystopic times do to our ability to love each other and the world?

COVID-19 has produced new taxonomies of love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Will its cultural afterlife be as lasting as that of HIV, which reshaped consciousness about sex and love even after AIDS itself had been beaten back by medical science? Will COVID end up making us more relationally conservative, as some think HIV did within gay culture? Will it send us fleeing into emotional silos or coupled cocoons, despite the fact that, pre-COVID, domestic coupledom had been steadily losing fans?

Just as COVID revealed our nation to itself, so did it hold a mirror up to our relationships. In Love in the Time of Contagion, Laura Kipnis weaves (often hilariously) her own (ambivalent) coupled lockdown experiences together with those of others and sets them against a larger backdrop: the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, and the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, mapping their effects on the everyday routines and occasional solaces of love and sex.

LAURA KIPNIS is a cultural critic and former video artist. The author of seven previous books, her writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Slate, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum. Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University, where she teaches filmmaking.
 

1. Love and Extinction 3

2. Vile Bodies: Heterosexuality and Its Discontents 55

3. Love on the Rocks: “Codependency”and Its Vicissitudes 105

4. Love and Chaos 151

Coda: Antibodies 193

Acknowledgments 209